It's a lovely film this. Bittersweet, engaging and wonderfully performed. A little vignette on small town English life from Mike Leigh which tackles big issues with sensitivity and small issues with wit. The plot of the film doesn't really go anywhere (a man is conned into buying a crappy burger van, his wife and daughter argue then make up and his friend opens a restaurant but has no customers) but the beauty is in the way that you enjoy and are enriched by this brief overview of the characters' lives. The dialogue has a natural flow and zippiness to it and each of the characters is well drawn, memorable and believeable with tics and affectations like Alison Steadman's nervous laugh at the end of each sentence or Claire Skinner's nasal sigh- the delivery of a world-weary seventeen year old. Even the minor characters like Aubrey and Patsy are comic characters without being caricatures. As with all of Mike Leigh's films this is the product of the lengthy and largely improvised rehearsals he insists upon. The benefits are on screen forever and their value in what transpires in the film are immeasurable.
The whole thing looks great. Granted the opportunity for grand widescreen footage of thousands of Zulu warriors on a majestic hillside or tracking shots through the crowded streets of New York are few and far between, but it looks thoroughly authentic. The scenes in this film are beautifully conceived and shot to imbue the whole thing with a kind of gritty resplendence- there are scenes in a scrapyard with a gaudily coloured van in the middle that look almost like a kind of fin de siècle artwork.
Leigh's film is warm and entertaining but is also unsentimental and matter-of-fact in its presentation of the characters. No devices are employed to elicit sympathy, as if that would cheapen or undermine the whole thing. Bravo for that. And yet his film is certainly empathetic towards Jane Horrocks' bulimic Nicola, the most externally unappealing character, and her struggles. The harrowing scenes of her emotional torture- writ large with her wringing, fidgeting panic-are finely balanced, steering clear of overbearing sensationalism, not played in adjacence to light comedy. It is an excellently judged treatment of a tough topic.
And the small journey which each of the characters- not least Natalie- goes upon allows them to succeed in small ways and fail in comic ones. Life is indeed sweet. Tough, painful, mundane and yet touched with light and love and happiness. Life Is Sweet is much like life itself. 10/10
